In Dymocks today I saw two new copies of Ruby on Rails – Up and Running. This turned out to be a book that I didn’t know I wanted until I saw it. So I bought it (justifying it by reminding myself of its relatively low price). Even if it’s at a level just slightly above many of the web based tutorials somehow having it in book form seems to help somehow…
In fact, just last night I’d been trying to figure out how ActiveRecord would practically work for me for building a little sample Camping app I was thinking of.
The idea (note small “i”) was just to build a little database driven app that I could use to keep track of who is currently borrowing my books. I could leave it running in a quiet spot of my website, maybe, where no-one but me could find it and thus I wouldn’t need user authentication (i.e., keeping it simple). It’s something that I could also have learned how to do in PHP, but that just wouldn’t be as cool, would it.
Of course reading the book made a number of things a lot clearer, making me think I should switch back to Plan A, to implement the Idea straight away in Rails. Bad idea. Walk before running.